At the IFA 2015, Huawei has announced their flagship device, the Mate S. The device is a direct competitor to iPhone 6 Plus and features a Force Touch (or Pressure sensitive display). Huawei was the first to implement Force touch even before Apple announced iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. The Huawei Mate S is a powerful flagship with good hardware and an all metal build which feels premium.
We had a chance to test the device at the Honor event in China and here are our first impressions of the Huawei Mate S.
Here is the quick hands-on video.
Huawei Mate S has an all metal body and the device we tested was a silver variant. The device is pretty compact in size with the 5.5 inch display. But the bezels are kept relatively low, so it is still manageable, but you might it difficult to use with one hand. The front panel has 5.5 inch Full HD display, 8MP front camera, and sensors. The Huawei logo sits at the bottom and the navigational buttons are on-screen.
The left side houses the SIM tray while the power and volume keys are on the right side. The top panel has 3.5mm audio jack, secondary microphone while the bottom section has micro USB charging slot and speaker unit. The rear panel houses the 13MP camera, dual tone LED flash and the fingerprint sensor. The rear panel has a slight curvature toward the edges. Overall, the build quality of the device is really good with a metallic unibody design.
The phone has a 5.5 inch Full HD display (1920 X 1080p) and the colors are pretty good with 401PPI. It is the first device to come with force touch display. The pressure-sensitive or force touch screen means that the panel distinguishes between a light tap or a harder press, and reacts accordingly.The IPS-NEO LCD panel also offers good viewing angles and the touch response was pretty smooth overall. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4. Under the bright sunlight, the display visibility was slightly lower. The phone runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with custom EMUI 3.1.
The phone is powered by homebrew Kirin 935 Octa-core processor and coupled with 3GB of RAM and 64GB (there is also 32GB variant) of internal storage. The UI was very response and we seldom noticed any lag or issues in our limited usage. The rear camera is 13 MP, dual-LED (dual tone) flash and there is also an 8MP front camera. The camera has a manual mode with ISO adjustments, exposure compensation, exposure time, white balance and focusing, as well as things like grid adjustments, and flash-assisted focusing. The phone has a nano-coating making it water resistant.
The device also features fast charging where in 10 minutes charging gives you 2 hours talking. The battery capacity is just 2700mAh which is pretty low for a flagship device. The device comes in three colors -Luxurious Gold, Mystic Champagne, Titanium Grey.
